
Bloody Tourist – Ceremony
The great studio musicians of old really miss the good ol’ days. Of course, they would. The 1980s was the last time that they were vital to making a hit record. Just imagine producers having to sit around for the band to tune up, only to realise that the guitar player or drummer wasn’t going to get their parts in 100 takes and having to phone a professional. In between, the band members do a line of coke and drink a glass of milk; the pros would be done.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of the producer. Since you went into trouble dragging the studio musician out of bed and since you needed to pay for them, you might as well make them to a few more takes. Since they brought guitars with them, at least, they gave them the courtesy of playing a guitar solo with each of them. And since the band members were jerks anyway, and you wanted future generations to know of the embarrassing detail that they didn’t even play on their own records, you would stick all of the solos on the actual record.
The music world belongs to bedroom producers and to the people present at Diddy’s parties. The latter are, for the moment, better off financially. But the bedroom producers are indispensable. Bloody Tourist’s “Ceremony” is an excellent, relaxed, lo-fi groove made by a duo that sounds like it benefited from an endless amount of studio hours and no interference from guitar virtuosos trying to make a buck. “Ceremony” is an excellently pieced-together track that allows you to travel through the mp3 collection of the band members and, at its best, makes you forget about life for a while.
Kris Lefcoe – Dirt
What did covers of songs really mean before every bar, garage and wedding procession had a group that could play them? Being in a cover band nowadays, in fact, is one of the most, if not one of the few, reliable jobs that will have you play an instrument. That and getting good enough to join the philharmonic where, technically, you’ll also be playing covers, albeit to fewer tipsy people looking to sing along to the words.
I can also presume that covers were a way for the musicians to locate people from their own tribe. Choosing the songs was a way to tell others about yourself and to weed out those who wouldn’t fit into your inner circle. Punk music critic Nick Kent talks about how he bonded with Chrissie Hynde over the fact that they were two of the only people in London who knew who Iggy Pop was.
But covers nowadays should be a reinvention, a personal journey into what the song meant for the person performing it. The Stooges was the greatest garage-rock band of all time. That’s why when they played a slow, dirty song, you know that they meant it. Where once stood the guitar riffs of Ron Asheton, Kris Lefcoe places sinister synth lines. Where once was a straight blues-rock groove, Lefcoe adds a jazzy beat. And where Iggy’s voice talked about self-destruction and degeneracy, Lefcoe talks about the same things but from a completely different angle. Kris Lefcoe reinvents the song as a sexy ode to misery.